It became associated with black culture because black people tended to have larger backyard gatherings, which means feeding a lot of people. They are also historically marginalized, and had lower incomes as a result. So not only were they feeding more people when they had parties; They were doing it for cheaper. Watermelon is a cheap and easy way to feed a dozen people, and fried chicken is cheaper than other forms of protein like steaks. Yes, both are delicious, but the stereotype happened because it was both cheap and could be served in large quantities for larger backyard parties.

This is great. Hit the gym memberships next.

There’s a LOT of snake oil in the audio world. Especially home theater and home studio setups. I’m a professional audio technician, and some of the “audiophile” setups I have seen are just outright asinine.

Use balanced signal for runs over ~3 feet. Use the cheapest star-quad cable you can get, and the most basic $4 Neutrik connectors. Why? Because that album you’re using to test your “hi-fi” sound system was recorded using exactly that: Cheap ¢30/foot cable and basic Neutrik connectors.

It’s also what concert setups use. You think a concert with six combined miles of cabling is going to be paying $2000 per cable? Fuck no, they’re using the cheap shit (which was hand soldered in bulk at the warehouse workbench by their lowest paid shop tech), to run that million dollar audio system. Their money goes to the speakers, amps, and mixer; Not gold plated wire, robotic soldering, or triple insulated jackets. In double-blind tests, audiophiles can’t hear the difference between a $500 cable and a couple of plasti-dipped coat hangers twisted together.

The people who complain about digital audio also can’t tell the difference in double-blind tests. Because modern audio hardware is able to perfectly emulate old analog gear. Google the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem for a breakdown of how we can perfectly capture and recreate analog audio with digital equipment. Vacuum tubes were groundbreaking when they were first used. But they had a lot of issues, and have very little relevance in today’s systems. They’re prone to burning out, notoriously fragile, and can be emulated perfectly.

It depends entirely on how the airline boards their plane. If they board front-to-back (like boarding first class early) then any open spots in the front are just that: Open. The people sitting there have already boarded.

Also, the “raise it to $15 per hour” minimum wage debate has been going on for so long that the $15 is now outdated. If the debate started again today, the number would realistically be closer to $25-$30 per hour.

And if you just got upset because you’re making $30 per hour and don’t want to be equated with minimum wage, then maybe you need to consider how much you could be making if minimum wage were higher. Here’s a hint: You’d be making much more than $30 per hour.

The real trick is to just use whichever overhead you see open as you approach your seat. It doesn’t need to be directly above your seat. You’re going to have to pass by it again on your way out of the plane anyways, so it’s not like you’ll be delaying anything during deboarding.

This is a noise reduction thing. It’s the same reason apartments only do hardwood on the ground floor. Your downstairs neighbors don’t want to listen to you moving around, and carpet is a great insulator and cushion.

• red light and speed cameras are illegal in my state

This doesn’t ban license plate reader cameras. My state also bans red light and speed cameras, but automatic license plate readers are 100% legal. I have seen the ALPL systems firsthand, and know they’re in use. You wouldn’t even notice them, because they’re mounted on traffic lights and power lines. It’s not like red light cameras, where they have a blatantly obvious giant camera box.

My local municipality 100% uses ALPLs, and has referenced them in a number of arrests recently. They’re mostly used for Amber Alert situations, where police already have a description of what to look for. In these cases, the ALPL will basically allow them to track the car in real time, without even needing to follow the car. Because they simply get updates every time the car passes an intersection, so they can set up a stop ahead of where the person is traveling.

Louisiana had famously (or infamously) lax liquor laws for decades, so maybe that‘s what you’re thinking of. Shit like drive-thru daiquiri stores, where as long as they don’t put the straw in the cup it’s not considered an “open” container. So they can just hand you a cup full of liquor, and the straw separately.

It’s also a large part of why New Orleans developed a reputation as a party town; Louisiana kept their drinking age at 18 while every other state was at 21, so all the college freshmen/sophomores would go to Louisiana during spring break because they could drink.

Yeah, the main company for most hotels literally got the exclusive contract by bribing the hell out of all of the hotel owners/executives. And they were so notoriously shitty that they bought a smaller company a few years ago, just so they could change their name to the smaller company’s name and attempt to sidestep lots of the bad reputation.

I mean, if they’re bagged in a low humidity environment and the bag stays sealed, there should be very little chance of them getting soggy. Because in order for them to get soggy, the bag would need humidity.

It’s the difference between past tense, and past participle. “I drew a picture” vs “the picture was drawn”.

And here’s a reminder that, following the horrible shooting at Uvalde and the police’s staggeringly bad response, they still reelected the local sheriff.

Yeah, I have a piece of mission-critical gear that is controlled by a computer running Windows XP. Because the control program is written in Flash and modern systems won’t run it. Migrating to a modern system would require a complete rewrite in a new language, and would also likely kill a lot of functionality.

Yup, this. Cover your ass by putting shit in writing via email, (and bcc your personal email too, so they can’t just delete the emails off the mail server and pretend they never existed.) But besides that, if the boss wants to have a vulnerable system, then that’s their prerogative.

Sort of. It does block the users, but only on your specific instance. If you’re interacting with a post on another instance and that instance is federated with them, you’ll still see them on that third instance.

Defederating basically takes the three instances from a closed triangle ◺ (where all users can see and post on all three instances) to an open triangle ∟ (where your instance and the defederated instance are blocked from each other, but the third instance can still see and interact with both.)

Did anybody say admins aren’t entitled to block stuff?

I mean, it’s a user complaining about defederation from known nazi instances. It gives off some big “free speech absolutist (as long as the free speech is hate speech)” vibes.

User just wanted a system to see everything and block what they didn’t want.

That system already exists. You can spin up your own instance in like 15 minutes, and have access to the entire unfiltered fediverse. But nobody wants to do that, because nobody actually wants to see the unfiltered fediverse. That shit is basically rawdogging the internet, because it’s full of extremists and pedophiles.

There is only one side who benefits from the “everything unfiltered by default, the user has to individually wade through mountains of slurs, hate, doxxing, and child porn to manually block all of them” option. And it isn’t the user. The only side that benefits is the side that now gets to peddle their BS to a wider audience.

If you genuinely want the fediverse to improve and grow, advocating for unfiltering isn’t the way. That shit will scare off any curious new users faster than any kind of reasonable filtering would. Imagine you make a new account, and your first interactions are blocking a thousand individual instances just so you don’t end up on a federal watch list.

Yeah, every now and then I hop over to an account on another instance, and immediately remember why I tend to hang out on .world…

.world isn’t perfect, but holy hell some of the other instances are just buried in tankie BS.

Factorio. I began seeing conveyor belts in my sleep.

I mean, cars can be demystified the same way computers can: By building and maintaining it yourself. Everyone is afraid to build their first computer, because it seems way too complicated and delicate. Then you actually build your first one, and go “oh hey this actually isn’t so bad after all.”

Yes, cars (especially modern cars) have a lot more difficult-to-build parts. But modern cars are also a lot like computers in the sense that you don’t need to know every single component on an GPU to be able to install one. You don’t need to be able to build a car part from scratch. The same way you can slot a GPU into a motherboard, you can just buy the entire car part preassembled and bolt it into place. The important part is learning what the different components do, so you can troubleshoot them.